Director Dorota Kobiela started her career making animated films with a series of shorts. While she was working on projects like "Little Postman" or "Chopin's Drawings" in 2011, something inside her keep pulling together her two greatest passions: making movies and the works of Dutch impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh.
She finally gave into this constantly growing desire and decided her next short film, "Loving Vincent," would be a look at van Gogh as shown through a unique way of using his paintings. A lot of the groundwork had been done because Kobiela had been a fan of van Gogh's work all her life even to the point of doing her college thesis on the artist.
One of the things that captivated her was that it wasn't until van Gogh had turned 28 that he decided to become an artist. In the brief span of just around a decade, he created an artistic legacy that made him one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art.
"He decided to become an artist to communicate with people, which he couldn't really do with words," Kobiela says. "But, he communicated so beautifully with his paintings. He was an extremely courageous artist and revolutionary. He was a person who worked very methodically and hard.
"It was incredible how in eight years he went from an amateur to one of the most celebrated and most important painters of modern art. That was incredibly inspiring to me."
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, her plan was to hand paint every single frame of the short film to match the visuals van Gogh presented through his more than 2,100 works. Kobiela was forced to adjust her plans when the project went from a short to a feature length production. The only way she would be able to tell the story in 65,000 hand-painted frames was to bring on a small army of 125 artists. The result is a feature film that looks at events after the death of van Gogh in 1890 as visualized through the blending of some of the artist's greatest works.
Selecting the right van Gogh works as the artistic foundation for the story was a monumental task.
"There were so many of Vincent's paintings that we didn't get to use," Kobiela says. "We had several versions of the script and each one was different because of the amount of story we told about Vincent's life and the paintings we would use.
"The first version of the film had a lot of the Dutch period of Vincent's work but didn't use them. We also had a lot of fantastic characters that we had to cut out of the script. We just couldn't use everything."
The army of artists would start with a painting like "The Starry Night" and use it as the style for a scene. They would not only create every element in the scene in van Gogh's style but also paint in the actors. Animators over the years have used a process known as rotoscoping to turn an actor's work into an animated character. In the case of "Loving Vincent," the artists used film of the actors who performed the script in a green screen environment as a reference to paint each performer into the scene one frame at a time.
"The process ended up being stop-motion animation using paint and canvas," Kobiela says.
The only moments in the film that aren't entirely based on one of van Gogh's works are the transition scenes. Kobiela guided her artists to find the way to blend sequences based on works from different periods in Van Gogh's life to make the film as fluid as possible. There were also times when the artists had to modify van Gogh's work because the shape of his canvas didn't match the dimensions of a film frame.
All of this was used to tell the story of events in France during the summer of 1891. Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) is given a letter that Vincent penned just before his death, by his father, Postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O'Dowd). The letter is to be hand delivered to Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother. But once Roulin discovers Theo has also died, he begins looking into the final days and suicide of van Gogh.
Making sure this story was told close to van Gogh's visual style came with a lot of unforeseen problems. The artists had to deal with the broad range of colors van Gogh used in his works and matching some of the hues was not easy.
"There were paintings where it was quite challenging to find a particular shade of blue, for example. With a painting like 'Starry Night' we tried combinations of Russian Blue and Cobalt but it was particularly hard to find that shade," Kobiela says. "And then with "The Night Cafe' there are a very particular shade of red and yellow all around.
"We also had the challenge of re-imagining Vincent because the tone of the film is very bright and very colorful but all his life, his story is kind of dark especially in our film."
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